The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 92

The silence lasted for a week. It was a heavy, suffocating quiet that was worse than any open attack. In the command center, the team worked in shifts, digging through the digital black box of the Lancaster family, finding nothing.

From Kaelen's perspective, it was a new and deeply unpleasant kind of fight. He was a man of action, and he was being forced to wait. Every morning, his global intelligence chiefs reported the same thing: no movement, no communications, no trace of Claudia Lancaster.

He was on a secure call with his head of European intelligence, his frustration a cold knot in his stomach. "So you're telling me," Kaelen said, his voice dangerously quiet, "that a woman with a multi-billion dollar asset portfolio and a global network can simply vanish?"

"Sir, it's not just that she's vanished," the man on the screen replied, his face grim. "It's that the places she should be are… clean. Too clean. It's like her history is being actively erased as we search for it."

Before Kaelen could respond, every screen in his office suddenly changed. A flood of breaking news alerts flashed across his monitors.

It was a coordinated, global media assault. The BBC. CNN. The Wall Street Journal. Every single one was running the same headline.

BLACKWOOD HEIR IMPLICATED IN DECADES-OLD CORPORATE SCANDAL.

"Sir…" his assistant, Marcus, said, his voice tight with shock from the doorway.

Kaelen's blood ran cold. He clicked on the first link. It was a detailed, beautifully packaged story, complete with scanned documents, timelines, and financial records.

The story was about the infamous hostile takeover of Stardust Corporation, a brutal business battle from over a decade ago that had cemented his father's ruthless reputation. The company's chairman, a man named Alistair Finch, had been financially ruined and had died in a car accident shortly after, an event the police had ruled accidental.

But this new file, simultaneously sent to every major news outlet and law enforcement agency in the world, told a different story.

It claimed to have new, irrefutable evidence. A sworn affidavit from a former Stardust accountant who had been in hiding. And worse, a series of documents that seemed to prove that the final, fatal paperwork that bankrupted Alistair Finch had been personally forged.

Forged by a young, ambitious Kaelen Blackwood, who was then in charge of finalizing the acquisition.

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